gallo ref3 with the golden ear awards?

I have extensively listened to these several times.
The Gallo's are good, decent speakers, but the Von Schweikerts are much better. I really cannot see,[hear], how these won golden ear awards! Oh well.

Bostonaudi and Audio_girl, I seriously question whether the Ref 3s you heard were broken in. I almost gave up on mine for sounding so grim until the first 100 hours was up. Also, I've head that more than one audio store is wiring them wrong, using the subwoofer (second voice coil) inputs instead of the main inputs by mistake. Right after I got mine, my salesman said he had sold 11 pairs in six weeks, and no pairs of any other speakers costing more than $2K, and this was BEFORE the first Absolute Sound review.

Bostonaurdi, since many reviewers, owners and future owners have express opinions radically different than yours, could it be that you were listening to either defective equipment or that the room dimensions were awful. One should never be to certain of an opinion based only on one audition. I have heard the Gallos in the same store 3 times and each time the sounded different, but at know time did they sound as you discribe. In my humble opinion the Gallo tweeter is incapable of producing harsh sounding high frequencies, unless the source material is pure garbage.

Audio_girl:

Just goes to show how subjective a thing the "sound" of a speaker system is to different people. The VR-4jrs and Ref III's were in my final 3, and it was a fairly easy call for me...for the Gallos. I've always been a proponent/addict of planar/ribbon tweeters, and although the CDT in the Gallos is not your typical ribbon transducer, it shares more with that configuration than it does with a conventional cone tweeter. Also I felt the Gallos had more slam, and although the JRs probably have a lower low end, their bass sounded looser and less well controlled than that of the R-III's. I think when you add the sub amp to the R-IIIs their bass performance is substantially better than the JRs, still for several hundred $'s less.

BTW, if anyone wants to know the definition of frustrated, I ordered my R-IIIs in late October and have yet to receive them. I've now been told something about there being a quality issue with the spine supplier that has set their production back. At least it's good to know they're rejecting substandard parts.

c-budgee,
During the break in period with my Gallos there was indeed a time where the tweeters produced some harsh sounding highs. As my other posts on the Gallos mention, it was at least 200 hours before their sound settled in to the magical stage.

David